VIA's K8T900 Chipset

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Introduction and Product Specifications

With the adoption of PCI Express as a next-gen I/O technology, all of the major chipset manufacturers worked hard to bring compatible chipsets to market. Naturally, Intel was first on the scene with the 900 series chipsets. But on the AMD side, VIA was first to market with its K8T890 Chipset. Building on the successes of the K8T800, which competed on the same level as nVidia's nForce 3 250 and nForce 3 Ultra, VIA aimed to take things to the next level with new features and improved overall performance. By coupling the K8T890 Northbridge with the promising VT8251 Southbridge, VIA's first PCI Express ready chipset aimed to deliver a number of new features, the most notable being the first dual-PCI Express graphics implementation with DualGFX Express.

Since the release of the K8T890 back in September of 2004, however, VIA has become virtually silent about the K8T890. When we scan the major players' product lines, we see a few K8T890 models being offered by such companies as Abit, ASUS, EPoX and MSI, but none were equipped with the VT8251 Southbridge, nor were there any Pro versions with DualGFX Express as planned. As it turned out, VIA had some major difficulties perfecting the audio and RAID 5 functionality of the VT8251. In fact, VIA had to rework the design of the VT8251 five times before ironing out all the kinks. Now, over a year later, VIA is ready to bring the VT8251 to market in conjunction with a re-worked Northbridge.

In the time it took to retool the VT8251, VIA made some design changes to the K8T890 Northbridge as well, bringing to light the new K8T900, which we will be discussing today. The new K8T900 adds further enhancements to the PCI Express implementation, aiming to deliver increased performance over the competition while offering dual-PEG slots as well.